Category Archives: Individual Rights

UPDATE II: President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis

Barack Obama, Democrats, Healthcare, Individual Rights

“President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Voluntarily, 14 million Americans had purchased and paid for their now-obsolete, outlawed health-care insurance. Stated differently, these individuals valued what the policy had to offer more than the money it cost them. They liked the product the president has proscribed.

And they don’t like what replaces it. George Schwab of North Carolina was “’perfectly happy” to continue paying Blue Cross Blue Shield a premium of $228 a month to insure himself and his wife.

President Obama wasn’t having any of it. By legislative fiat, he stopped what was a mutually beneficial arrangement between the two consenting parties.

On Oct. 30, Big Brother Obama claimed that Mr. Schwab and millions of happy customers like him were “underinsured.” So Obama ensured that for “underinsuring” themselves, these Americans would lose their insurance.

Mr. Schwab and his ilk are now without insurance.

From the president’s perspective, the 62-year-old man does not know what’s good for him. Fortunately for Mr. Schwab and other clueless clients like him, Big Brother does. To the rescue came Obama. Mr. Schwab had fallen prey to a “bad apple insurer,” grated the president. He is among “5 percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.”

Foolish Mr. Schwab. He was content with a purchase Mr. Obama deemed “substandard.” Luckily for Mr. Schwab and a million other Americans, so far, the president removed their “substandard plan” before it could hurt them.

Better to be uninsured than to have “substandard” insurance.

Also on Oct. 30 did Mr. Obama vow to the Mr. Schwabs of America—roughly 14 million of them—that they would be “getting a better deal.” “Almost all the insurers,” cooed the president, “are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace …”

Desperate, Mr. Schwab went looking for the Promised Plan.

He discovered that Barack Obama’s command-and-control, nationalized “marketplace” would be charging him $948 a month for a plan that met the president’s requirements, one of which was that everybody must “contribute.” Everyone must “take some measure of responsibility,” preached Obama.

A monthly premium hike of more than 400 percent is to be Mr. Schwab’s “contribution” to the un-Affordable Care Act’s collective kitty. …

Read the complete column. “President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis” is now on WND.

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UPDATE I: MEGYN KELLY interviews MARC THIESSEN of the AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FELLOW, who explains why it was essential for Obama to finish off the individual market for health-care insurance: this relatively wealthy cohort must be funneled into his nationalized “markets” and made to fund it.

KELLY: … And tonight, we have dug up an IRS form from 2010 that shows that this administration knew that over 10 million Americans would not keep their plan, could not keep their doctor. And yet the president went out as recently as 2012 and said if you like your plan you could keep it. Meantime there is a regulation — an IRS regulation, it was pushed by HHS, Human Services, that said estimated that tens of millions would going to get dumped.

Marc Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. And I mean, this is it. It is one thing to say — he said they were going to get to keep their plans, period. And now this regulation shows that months after ObamaCare was passed, July, it passed in March. July or before, I should say. Before, they knew. They were estimating internally in the administration ten million people are going to lose their insurance.

MARC THIESSEN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FELLOW: Yes. You’ve got the smoking gun right there in your hand. Look, they knew. When President Obama looked at the American people in the eye and said if you like your health insurance, you can keep your current plan, period, no matter what, that was a bald-faced lie.

And he intended — in fact, I think that they intended for these people to lose their health insurance. And the reason for that is — as you pointed out — it will be up to 14 million people. Why would they want those people to lose their health insurance? Because they need those people to move into the exchanges to subsidize the poor people.

The individual mandate is the most lucrative part — I’m sorry, the individual market is the most lucrative part of the segment of the health insurance industry because those people don’t use a lot of services and they are generally healthy. And so, those are the people that they need to move into the exchanges in order to subsidize ObamaCare.

So, while President Obama was going out there saying you won’t lose your health insurance, period, all along they were planning for those people to lose their health insurance — 14 million of them and move into the exchanges.

UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan quips in his latest column:

Obama’s assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips! No new taxes,” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.

Priceless.

Long Live Big Brother

Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Internet, Law, Liberty, Media, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism

Long live Big Brother
By Myron Pauli

In 1788, Jefferson observed: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground”. Now, apparently, our National Security Agency might be compiling a Yottabyte of data – a trillion trillion bytes which is over 3000 trillion bytes per American. Consider that to store a 9 digit zipcode on you every minute for 100 years is only 1 billion bytes (without data compression), that is a lot of information – “We want information”.

Banks, FBI, IRS, and “Fair-Tax advocates” want to eliminate cash – thus, everything you spend can be monitored. Devices in your car, phone, person, and probably soon clothing can track you 24/7. Like Santa Claus, the government knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake – and stores that knowledge indefinitely.

Search engines can find out who you call, where you go, what you read and write, your friends, your relatives, your medical records, your purchases – all accessible. Is Joe Biden a stingy tipper or did Rand Paul ever set foot in a strip club – ask Uncle Sam? Blackmail-R-Us.

And who has access – potentially millions of people – J Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Bradley Manning, IRS, Barack Obama, Verizon, Vladimir Putin, FBI, CIA, BATF, Alabama State Police, Citigroup, who knows… – and anyone that one of these people gives information to! Search for “libertarian Jews” or “anorexic Ukrainian lesbians” or imagine a Chinese agent in Utah searching for “Chinese grad students in America who read Ayn Rand” – all inside that Yottabyte – soon to be expanded to kilo-Yottabytes.

With new laws and “administrative regulations” passed each year, more and more Americans are probably in some degree of non-compliance. In the past, of course, surveillance was confined to hard core terrorists such as Wendell Willkie, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Robert Bork, and Martha Stewart.

Now it is YOU!

Just contemplate all the info in the hands of prosecutors such as Michael Nifong, Angela Corey, Torquemada, and John Yoo – exercising their prosecutorial discretion. America already holds 25% of jail inmates worldwide and the Yottabyte archive can assure our global leadership in this category for years to come.

The mainstream media, however, seems to care little. From FOX through MSNBC, the focus is not on the 4th Amendment (what’s that??) but just how “Snowden is evil” (24-1 in Washington Post op-eds). Harassing the lover of reporter Glenn Greenwald (is David Miranda a terrorist?) only receives minor attention.

When the media focuses on human rights, it concentrates on the specks and logs in overseas eyeballs and not in our own. We are told how things are bad for blacks in Libya or Christians in Egypt (sometimes as a result of our own meddling!). That is the “safe” human rights advocacy – it not only does not challenge the American power structure but actually supports the Department of Defense.

“Fight mistreatment of gays in Russia with the Lockheed F-35 fighter” or “Build the Zumwalt destroyer to liberate women in Afghanistan.” Where popular opinion could make a difference – that is, our own country. – we can just be told “Shut up – it is always worse in North Korea”.

Then we can add in “Stop-and-frisk.” Rightists love anything that involves police and military. Leftists only care if it is “fair” – frisking black “youths” at midnight is OK if you frisk oriental grandmothers at noon. Harassing Farouk from Yemen, when boarding an airplane is fine as long as 5-year-old Suzi from Ashtabula also gets the rubber hose. An Equal-Opportunity-Gestapo – hallelujah!

There are some signs that some Americans are changing their minds on the limitless Yottabyte Archive State. Unfortunately, there will always be “threats” – some wacko will shoot up a school periodically or a Boston Marathon bomber or DC Sniper will strut his stuff. In between the low-level carnage, the FBI can always find (typically) ex-con addicted minority dimwits and convince them to try to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with wire cutters or drive a bus into the Sears Tower. The trillions of $$ spent on defense can never be enough and the Yottabyte Archive needs more info on all of us. As they might say in Casablanca, “Round up the usual 313,900,000 subjects”.

Long live Big Brother!

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Surveillance Societies Condition Helplessness, Anxiety and Compliance.

Constitution, Individual Rights, Internet, Justice, Law, Liberty, Regulation, Technology, Terrorism, The State

“It’s slow and subtle,” writes Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, “but surveillance societies inexorably train us for helplessness, anxiety and compliance. Maybe they’ll never look at your call logs, read your emails or listen in on your intimate conversations. You’ll just live with the knowledge that they always could — and if you ever had anything worth hiding, there would be nowhere left to hide it.”

An superb piece by Sanchez, which I’ve followed, below, with a Sanchez segment on Stossel:

Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyeror an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?

Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.

It’s precisely this kind of analysis the NSA is likely interested in doing to help “fingerprint” either specific suspects or the general profile of a terror suspect. Link that information to other data sets being collected, like credit card bills, and you can even deduce when a woman is pregnant before her own family knows. Think of big data analysis as a statistical Sherlock Holmes, capable of making surprising inferences from seemingly insignificant details and patterns.

But fine, so what if a bunch of strangers in a room in Fort Meade could, in principle, discover these things about you? There’s no reason to think they’re digging for that kind of stuff, and even if they did, it’d be like learning there are naked photos of you circulating in a Mongolian village: A little creepy, maybe, but unlikely to have a concrete effect on your life.

Assuming you don’t match a profile that gets you flagged for more intensive surveillance, that’s probably right — as long as they’re only using that vast, rich database to look for specific terror or espionage suspects. If they change their minds about the rules governing access to the database or how it’s put to use, of course, we’re unlikely to ever know; we didn’t know what the rules were before the leak either.

That’s one problem with bulk collection of data. The information often sticks around indefinitely, while the rules only stick around until someone decides to change them. The IRS is all fired up to use big data to hunt for tax cheats, and in principle, the NSA can disseminate evidence of some crime. Sooner or later, other agencies may start to wonder why such a juicy data set is going to waste.

But the average person is unlikely to pique the NSA’s interest, even when those sweeping surveillance powers are abused for purposes ranging beyond terrorism. It probably won’t affect you personally or directly.

However, that seems like an awfully narrow way to think about the importance of privacy. Folks don’t usually say (aloud, anyway), “I’m white, why should I care about racism?” or, “My political and religious views are too mainstream to ever be restricted, so why should I care about the First Amendment?”

READ ON.

And watch (no transcripts, of course) Stossel, as Sanchez explains that “most cellphone carriers have the capability to install remote spyware on your cell phone,” in addition to the dozens of [other] ways we can [and are being] tracked.

Change Your Constitution, Says Another British Redcoat

Britain, English, Founding Fathers, GUNS, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Terrorism

He looks about 12-years old and is already retired. Where could he possible have worked? In the military, of course, where you are put out to pasture decades before individuals in the private sector (read the real economy) can retire. His name is Lt. Col. Michael Kay, formerly an adviser to the British Ministry of Defense. Lt. Col. Kay is here to tell Americans that, because the amorphous terrorist threat against us is “unconventional”—the National Security Agency has to take unconventional means to counter this undefined, unconventional threat.

Magnanimously, Kay concedes his host’s point about the NSA’s trampling of the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, in particular. But hey, what do the Brits know about a constitution—they’ve already trashed their ancient, unwritten, venerated freedoms which inspired the fathers of this nation. Kay, of course, makes his living stoking fear.

Piers Morgan is another Briton who, from his perch at CNN, suborns treason against Americans by preaching against their natural right to defend life and property.

The backdrop: The Washington Post’s revelation—a mere formality really—that the president’s protestations to the contrary, “The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.”

MORE.